ACL compiles a daily media monitoring service of stories of interest to the Christian constituency relating to children, family, drugs and alcohol, marriage, human rights, religious freedom etc. Visit the ACL’s website each day to see what’s of interest in the news. Please note that selection of the articles does not represent ACL endorsement of the content.

Fifty years ago I sat in the shade of a mulga tree near Officer Creek in the far northwest of South Australia observing work being done to supply infrastructure for a new settlement for Pitjantjatjara-Yankunytjatjara people.

Don’t laugh - but Julia Gillard is staking her leadership on her abilities as a salesperson. The prime minister is gambling that she can sell voters on the idea that all asylum seeker boat arrivals from now on are Tony Abbott’s fault.

The Greens need a lesson in democracy, veteran political commentator Dean Jaensch fears. The retired professor of political and international studies at Flinders University in South Australia is not known for partisan interventions.

A year or two ago, I took a taxi from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. It was a brilliant sunny day and all around me the hills were green, as we passed a prosperous Arab village, a beautiful kibbutz, a bit of jangled traffic.

This is the text of a speech delivered by Pope Benedict XVI to the Federal Parliament in Berlin during his Apostolic visit to Germany, on 22 September 2011. It is an honour and a joy for me to speak before this distinguished house, before the Parliament of my native Germany, that meets here as a democratically elected representation of the people, in order to work for the good of the Federal Republic of Germany. I should like to thank the President of the Bundestag both for his invitation to deliver this address and for the kind words of greeting and appreciation with which he has welcomed me.

In a world where crisis has become a far too overused term it is tempting to draw the conclusion that humanity has lost its capacity to influence its destiny. Warnings of a financial meltdown, cataclysmic climate change, antibiotic-resistant superbugs and catastrophic super-terrorists all communicate the idea that the magnitude of the threats facing humanity calls into question its survival.